What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Mistress America,’ a secret Thanksgiving classic starring Greta Gerwig
Noah Baumbach is about to re-enter the Oscar conversation with his George Clooney-starring, Hollywood-friendly comedy-drama Jay Kelly. (It hits Netflix in December.) Baumbach’s life and sometime creative partner Greta Gerwig, meanwhile, has a supporting role in the film and is working on her upcoming Chronicles of Narnia adaptation, also for Netflix. But before both filmmakers ventured into bigger-budget, bigger-star territory, they were working together in smaller, Sundance-scale indies like Frances Ha and Mistress America, with Gerwig starring, Baumbach directing, and both of them co-writing. Frances Ha is their project that sits alongside Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and Marriage Story in the Criterion Collection. But the less-seen Mistress America, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary, is just as good – as Frances Ha, or as anything else either Baumbach or Gerwig has worked on before or since. And as it happens, the perfect season to watch it is upon us.
Why watch Mistress America tonight?
After you’ve seen Planes, Trains and Automobiles the requisite 500 times, the field of classic Thanksgiving movies gets a little thin – especially if you also eliminate movies that revel in the shrill cliches of “funny” familial dysfunction. So give thanks to Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig for Mistress America, which makes for a fine Thanksgiving substitute.
The vast majority of the movie doesn’t actually take place on Thanksgiving. Most of it unfolds in the fall-semester run-up to the holiday, beginning with Tracy (Lola Kirke) arriving at Barnard in Manhattan for college, and experiencing the kind of low-key, socially-adrift freshman-year hostilities rarely depicted in campus comedies. Her divorced mother, due to remarry over the Thanksgiving weekend, urges her to contact Brooke (Greta Gerwig), her future step-sister. Brooke, hovering around 30 and already appearing to dread 40, hustles through her New York lifestyle, half self-described autodidact and half dilettante. Tracy clearly admires her, even as she privately doubts that Brooke’s plan to secure funding for a restaurant venture will actually work out. She pours those observations into a short story that she hopes will get her a spot in Barnard’s most prestigious literary society.
While only about five minutes at the end of the movie are technically set on Thanksgiving (there is footage of Kirke at the big Macy’s parade!), the movie captures the precise period between starting college and (maybe) coming home for that first holiday break, which often punctuates those early weeks with bittersweet clarity. The source of Tracy’s sometimes-icy angst isn’t a lost connection with her high-school friends – it’s implied she doesn’t have many, even though, as she says, “if I could just figure out my look, I’d be the most beautiful woman in the world” – but rather her understandable impatience to become whoever she pictured she would morph into at college. That’s mirrored in Brooke, a decade-plus older and using her screwball energy to secure a more stable future for herself.
It’s actually Brooke who reconnects with an old friend; the back half of the movie has Tracy, Brooke, and two of Tracy’s college friends storming the suburban Connecticut home of Brooke’s ex-friend and “nemesis” Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind) in search of further restaurant funding. The fractious-farce energy of this extended sequence does have a touch of that familial dysfunction, even with the actual family members off-camera. It’s also the one stretch of the movie where time doesn’t jump forward consistently. Baumbach and Gerwig keep a relentless pace in both the writing and the editing, which enhances both the comedy (as in Frances Ha, the edits sometimes serve as punchlines) and the dramatic abruptness that occasionally throws Tracy off when she’s with her beguiling prospective step-sib.
Kirke, younger sister of Jemima Kirke from Girls, is an unusual presence with a great ear for Baumbach/Gerwig dialogue. But it’s Gerwig herself who delivers a tour de force. She was an in-demand actress before ascending to the upper tier of studio directors with Little Women and Barbie, and this may actually be her best role. Brooke is both more confident than Frances, and more secretly insecure about her endless freelance hustle; she didn’t go to college, something she defensively brings up repeatedly (and also something she doesn’t have in common with many other Baumbach characters). There’s a timelessness to her characterization, such that even the aspects of the movie that should be heavily dated to a decade ago, like Brooke’s chatter about social media, still ring funny and true even if they’re clearly not happening in 2025. Besides, it was already meant to be weird back in 2015: “Just a quick tweet on Twitter,” Brooke offhands. Later: “Nate dropped a gram on Instagram. That means picture.” Eventually Tracy admonishes her: “Stop talking about Twitter, it’s so awkward!”
Honestly, I could keep on dropping lines from Mistress America all day. Fully half of the movie’s dialogue is hilarious, and some of it has become weirdly applicable to generational stuff that’s happened in the past decade (“Where is this old-person morality coming from?”). It’s better to just fire up this 85-minute wonder for yourself anytime between September and Thanksgiving weekend and enjoy the most weirdly autumnal screwball farce ever made.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
